Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg on What’s Next for Tumblr

Great interview by Nilay Patel and Julia Alexander from The Verge with Matt Mullenweg, on Automattic’s acquisition of Tumblr from Verizon.

A lot of people are making hay over the price — Yahoo paid $1.1 billion for Tumblr six years ago, and Verizon apparently sold it to Automattic (best known as the parent company of WordPress) for just $3 million. But it seems clear that Verizon wasn’t looking for the best price — they were looking for the best home. Might be hard to believe because we’re talking about Verizon here, but there’s no other explanation than that they wanted to do what was best for Tumblr — both its employees and its users. Admirable.

Mullenweg’s remarks on the influence of app stores — and I think it’s pretty clear he was largely talking about Apple’s, and that he talked about them in the general lowercase sense so as not to come across as impolitic — was rather eye-opening. Automattic pretty much embodies the ideal of a for-profit company that fully embraces the open web. Their core product, WordPress, is and always has been fully open source. But apps are so important today — and so important for Tumblr users, apparently — that app store policies have significant influence on Automattic’s decisions on content policies.

★ Tuesday, 20 August 2019